MTC (Machine-Type Communication, also commonly known as M2M or Machine to Machine communication) concerns data communications between machines that do not need human interaction. MTC will become the next trillion-dollars-level communication market. Currently 3GPP SA1 has set up a work item and is working on the specification TS 22.368 (Service Requirements for Machine-Type Communications; Stage 1). Recently 3GPP SA2 has also set up a study item (Network Improvements for Machine-Type Communications) to study MTC.
MTC is different to existing mobile network communication services, so the current telecommunication network is required to be enhanced to adapt for MTC. TS 22.368 defines many MTC features, among which Group Based MTC Features are an important type of MTC features.
TR 23.888 also defines Group Based Optimization as a key issue for network improvement for MTC. Group based optimization may include optimizations in many aspects, e.g. group based billing optimization, group based signaling saving, etc. Among them, group based mobility is an important optimization. One example of such a group is typically a number of MTC devices in a vehicle (e.g. a car), belonging to a single MTC user and used by different applications such as driver security, navigation, car diagnostics, etc. However, since these MTC devices may be used by different applications, they may be connected to different MTC Servers and thus work independently of each other. Since these MTC devices are adherent to the same vehicle, they will have the same movement pattern and hence, they will be within reach of the same eNB (Evolved Node B) and in the same cell at the same time. This common movement behavior will result in a surge of mobility management signaling, increase in network load, power consumption in the MTC devices, etc. In order to overcome these adverse effects, some improvements to the network or system are required.
A potential improvement is to allow group based mobility management signaling saving for such group of MTC devices. However, there are no existing solutions for this problem till now. TR 23.888 only describes the group based optimization issue, but does not present the solutions for the issue. And all the SA2 contributions for this TR have not proposed any solutions.
In this paper, the inventor proposes a mechanism for solving group based mobility optimization issue in Machine-Type Communications, to overcome the problem existing in the prior art.